


A Dream of Falling

by bonebo



Series: Though Still In Chains (I Sang for the Sky) [2]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Prison, dark things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-14 11:44:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1265287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonebo/pseuds/bonebo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wonders if he'll witness the destruction of his world. </p><p>Yet if he could only look in the mirror, he could see that as it stands he's already in ruins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tick

In the darkness of a half-forgotten cell on the bleak mazes of Garrus-1, a dim yellow optic flickers.

A processor boots up, slow and sluggish, and he comes online to a HUD full of blaring alerts:

_ENERGON LEVELS: CRITICALLY LOW_

_RIGHT AUXILIARY FLIGHT MECHANISMS: DAMAGED_

_LEFT AUXILIARY FLIGHT MECHANISMS: DAMAGED_

_PRIMARY VENTILATION SYSTEM: FAULTED_

_INTERNAL VOCALIZING SYSTEM: FAILED..._

He scrolls through the diagnostics almost carelessly, searching for anything that is life-threatening or drastically out of place; he finds nothing, no damage that he hadn't known about before the emergency stasis, which is...disappointing, he thinks. At least if he's on the brink of fadeout, they'll let him leave the cell.

Won't they?

With the creak of protesting armor plates he forces himself to rise out of the various fluids—he doesn't want to think about them right now—that puddle beneath him on the cold floor; they've been seeping into his servos, coating the cracked linings and caking along his moving parts, making his empty intakes roil in a mix of revulsion and...and some kind of, of craving, that makes him think...

He doesn't want to think about it right now. 

After a long internal struggle he shifts to a sitting position against the wall, helm dropped back heavily and optic offlined.

It hurts.

All of it hurts—everything in him, everything he is made of. Every joint aches, every panel and plate feels as though it is splitting into tiny cracks, there's pressure in his helm that rises with every movement he makes; he feels as though he could shatter into a billion pieces and rust away until he is nothing, nothing but a stain on this dirty floor or dust piled in a corner, and he would still hurt.

Fighting through static and blackness, his optic groggily comes online.

The ceiling comes into focus first, and he sees watch hands, hundreds of them in sizes great and tiny, all spinning in circles along the splattered, rusty tiles; the fantasy makes him equally happy and—and mournful, he decides, after a moment, sad and empty.

Never again.

His optic slides to black, and he slumps against the wall; at least now he's out of the filth, partly, won't rust away as fast, may even function to see the day he can leave this horrible rock in the middle of space with its cruel sadistic protection and false promises of _Free in '63!_ scrawled on every wall in sight.

_Free in '63!_

The phrase sickens him, angers him, he feels—cheated, somehow, like watching someone else claim a prize that was never his to have in the first place but still being enraged over the denial. 

The watch hands slide around his optic, and he counts three rotations—three lifetimes—before he feels his starved engine start to shut down. The warning for emergency stasis flashes across his HUD in a glaring red, red as the signs in the hall that blare out _NO FIGHTING_ and he could laugh because not a single bot in this trap follows that rule, or any others that he knows of, except for survival of the fittest.

He hasn't been fit in quite some time, yet through Primus's—mercy or cruelty, he hasn't decided—he still survives.

And the rule still remains, even though no one follows rules, because the Senate—the Senate is crumbling, is it not? Only a matter of time before the thing is gone completely, and anarchy reigns, or worse.

He slips offline to a faint ticking in his audios, wonders if he will witness the destruction of his world.

____

 

He doesn't know how much time passes before he comes online again, but when he does, it's to voices.

Diagnostics run and he ignores them, optic still offlined; his audios crackle with static and he desperately fights through it to hear, to glean whatever information he can, because confined alone here in the dark and the cold it could possibly be the only warning he gets before he's assaulted—or worse—yet again.

_Why are there voices outside of his door._

Why—why do they insist on coming here, on tormenting him...hasn't he suffered enough? Endured enough? Bled enough, screamed enough, thrashed and fought and yielded and begged and _please stop please stop Primus please please make it stop_ —enough?

Apparently not.

He's already shaking and the door hasn't even opened, just their muffled voices in the hall—why his door, why him, why why _why_ —are more than enough to make his emergency systems kick on. His HUD flares in warning, scrolling infinite lists of precautions that are already being activated; he desperately tries to shut down his sensory net but the command won't take, again and again his HUD pops up with _COMMAND OVERRIDDEN_ and he could sob because this isn't even his body, not really, so is it actually all that strange that he is not the one to be in full control of it?

Of course it is. Everything is strange, has been since the day he lost his hands—or maybe even before that. He doesn't remember, it was so long ago, and he—

He doesn't want to think about it right now.

Because right now he's too wrapped up in trying to stop himself from shaking all the bolts out of his frame, trying to force his intakes to stop roiling, trying to quiet the alarms blaring in his head and trying to sit 

_perfectly_

_still_

in his little corner of this little prison on a little moon in a big big universe. 

So hard does he focus on playing dead, on pretending to be what he's wanted to be for years, that he's startled by the door finally creaking open and jerks hard; immediately his emergency systems snap into action, panic flaring up and displays littering his HUD, and the lightning-fast demand for energy is such a toll on his starved frame that he slumps limply to the floor.

He's offline before he even sees his visitor's face.


	2. Tock

Strings of startup code sluggishly scroll across his display.

He recognizes the foreign tingle of a forced startup, the scalding prickle that laces through his sensornet and bleeds into every system it finds—it's dimly familiar, he thinks, hated but familiar, and he clings to it as he gradually becomes aware of his surroundings.

He's not lying on the floor of his cell anymore, that he knows; his external sensors tell him of a soft mesh beneath him, a _berth_ , and for a moment all his brain can think of is that he's just awoken from a very long, very terrible dream.

But then the internal sensors come online, and his HUD is assaulted with one error message after another, and he knows he's wrong.

_FLIGHT SYSTEMS: OFFLINE_

_WEAPONS SYSTEMS: OFFLINE_

_TRANSFORMATION SYSTEMS: DISABLED_

_ENERGON LEVELS: MODERATE_

“...in one piece. The guards really let the other inmates tear him up.”

He feels his empty intakes drop at the voice. 

It's completely unfamiliar, slightly high-pitched and scratchy, and he's fairly sure he's never heard it before in his existence but that doesn't matter—what matters is that it is there, standing on his right side near one ruined, aching rotor, and he is here, lying on a berth as the fragging _picture_ of helpless with neither a way to fight or flee. 

“Think it's because of the empurata?”

The second voice speaks, lower than its partner, and his ventilation systems kick on with a soft _whirr_ that echoes around the room. There's a pause—maybe the two are looking at him now, he doesn't know, he has neither the energy nor the desire to online his optic—and then the first voice chuckles.

“Well. I'm sure he had a winning personality.”

_SELF-REPAIR SYSTEMS: DISABLED_

_RECOVERY STASIS ADVISED_

Stasis—that would be wonderful. Eternal stasis, permanent stasis; he'd settle for stasis-lock right now, just for a way to avoid the voices that hover over him, avoid any other members of his race, avoid any more pain. 

Is it so much to ask, just to not be hurt anymore?

“...well. Look here, seems he's finally coming around.”

Apparently so.

Frantic, he sends the command to induce stasis, to power down, to escape—and _COMMAND OVERRIDDEN_ flares up on his HUD, bright and bold, and he could scream if his vocalizer wasn't overridden because _when will he learn, this body is not his to control?_ Again he tries, and again, frame jerking as a servo settles over his long-shattered cockpit glass.

_COMMAND OVERRIDDEN_

_COMMAND OVERRIDDEN_

_COMMAND OVERRIDDEN_

“Easy there, kid. We ain't gonna hurt ya.” The hot tingling has finally reached his helm, and his optic comes online to see a chunky, black and white mech hovering over him; his blue optics glow softly in the dimness of the room, locked upon Whirl's frame as it suddenly goes very still beneath his servo. “...Foglamp. Kill the overrides, yeah?”

“Sure, Spotlight.” There's motion to his left and Whirl looks over sharply, his joints creaking, to see the back of a smaller, silver frame. Foglamp turns around with a cylinder full of pale green liquid in his servo, and as Whirl stares he attaches it to a tube that leads directly into Whirl's main medical port.

“There.” Foglamp looks at Whirl with a slight grin on his faceplates, optics orange and young and bright. Whirl stares numbly back. “That should take effect pretty soon. We thought you were a goner!”

“It's true,” Spotlight comments, stepping back; Whirl looks past him, briefly, to see that the room he's in is Garrus-1's medical bay. It's a room that he knows nearly as well as his cell. “When Prime sent us out here, we didn't think we'd be finding much..not since the break, y'know.” 

Whirl's gaze snaps back to him at that—break? What break? There had been a break?

“Oh...well, I uh, guess you don't know?” Foglamp tilts his helm at Whirl, then looks up to Spotlight, mouth open uncertainly. “I...maybe he was in stasis-lock? His levels were critical when we found him...”

Spotlight is quiet as he ponders, looking at Whirl thoughtfully; Whirl holds his gaze for a sparkpulse before looking away, unnerved, and Spotlight lets a low ventilation sigh through his frame. “...yeah. I guess you're right, Foglamp; this guy probably has no idea.”

“It wasn't so long ago—but Megatron's forces made a surge. No one really knows how, but news got to this prison, and...” Spotlight trails off, pauses, then adds in a hushed whisper, “I don't know if you know, but there's Decepticon sympathizers in here.”

Whirl stares at him, absurdly glad he is unable to reply. Never in his life has he wanted to shoot a mech so badly.

“Anyway, these sympathizers...we can only guess they were working with the guards, because the next thing we knew Garrus-1 was experiencing a massive jailbreak. We had reports of escaped convicts flooding in left and right, and of course, where did most of them go?” Spotlight scowls. “Megatron.”

“But that's why we came here!” Foglamp pipes up. “Prime thought there had to be at least a few Autobots stuck here, maybe incapacitated after the battle? So we came to see who we could find and bring them back with us, as new recruits!”

“Except,” Spotlight cuts in, growling softly, “There were supposed to be upwards of a dozen. All we've found is...”

Whirl looks between them, mind spinning with disbelief. There had been Autobots in these wretched halls, he'd seen them himself, and surely they wouldn't all just leave—

“You.”

Silence reigns after that, Whirl staring between the two Autobots blankly. He can't think of anything to say, and even if he could, his vocalizer was commanded off orns ago; Foglamp is finally the one to break the silence, as he nudges Whirl's rotor. 

“Go on, see if the serum's taken away the overrides. Try to turn on your transformation system, or something. It should be in effect by now.”

Right. The overrides. Whirl pulls up diagnostics on his HUD, letting the system check run and sending the command. It's but a sparkpulse later when the bulletin pops up on his display.

_TRANSFORMATION SYSTEMS: ONLINE_

He stares at the notification, something in his core flickering, and in a rush continues down the list.

_SELF-REPAIR SYSTEMS: ENABLED_

_FLIGHT SYSTEMS: ONLINE_

_INTERNAL VOCALIZING SYSTEM: ONLINE_

“...hey...kid.” Spotlight nudges Whirl's frame, voice taking a cautious tone. “Don't overdo it, now...we've only given you permission to turn on your transformation systems. Nothing else. Understand?”

Whirl looks up at him, something hot rushing through his circuits, a freedom he hasn't felt in what seems like lifetimes. Never again will he need someone else's permission to handle his— _his_ —body.

_WEAPONS SYSTEM: ONLINE_

It takes longer than it should, he knows, for his guns to power up; the metal's been warped and twisted, snapped off near the base, but it still shoots fairly true as he fires. The blast sails straight into Spotlight's spark chamber, exploding in a great show of red and orange and pale blue, and this close, Whirl knows it's fatal.

Somewhere to his left Foglamp screeches, but Whirl can not care; he rolls and then more blasts are upon Foglamp, the slender little mech crumpling to the ground as fire engulfs his chest. He writhes on the floor and claws at himself, voice a horrible screaming thing, until Whirl is standing and firing once more and Foglamp goes still.

For a moment, Whirl does nothing but stand there, swaying slightly on his pedes—everything is quiet and dark and he likes it. Likes this feeling he thought was gone forever, this energy that thrums through him, likes being alive and functioning and _free_.

Finally, he is free.

He grabs a few supplies from the med-bay before he leaves—but he can't be bothered to grab anything that he does not absolutely need, because empty as it is this place is still full of memories, and he doesn't want to _think_ about it right now. He feels no remorse as he steps over Foglamp's body to walk out.

Because while killing is a bad thing to do, Whirl is a bad person, part of a race made up of bad people. He's come to accept this—the goal of any Cybertronian is, apparently, to do harm. 

So he will.

He will strive to be the worst, the deadliest, and by extension the best; he will kill, he will maim, and he will laugh when he comes through it all coated in the energon of his enemies.

He will be a walking nightmare.

And he will only fall in his dreams.


End file.
